Our History

Red Cross Volunteer Listened to Grief, Rage

By Maya Dollarhide

WEnews correspondent

Monday, October 29, 2001

Nearly overcome with her own anxiety and sadness, graphic artist Kathryn Carey pleaded to be permitted to help in the catastrophe. She found herself running a center for trauma victims, making sure they knew where to find the help they needed.

NEW YORK (WOMENSENEWS)--Part-time graphic artist Kathryn Carey, 29, spent the late morning of Sept. 11 in her Brooklyn apartment typing the same e-mail over and over to her friend Eric Eisenberg, who was a director at Aon Inc., a risk management and brokerage firm on the 98th floor at the World Trade Center.

"Tell me you are alive," she typed and hit the enter key. "Tell me you are alive," she typed again and hit the key again. Again and again, as her despair rose.

She could not share her anxiety with the man she has been together with for the past 20 months--Michael Lyons, a firefighter in a Brooklyn company. He was at Ground Zero frantically trying to rescue the thousands evacuating the buildings.

She had to do something. The offices of her employer, amFAR, the American Foundation for AIDS Research, were on Wall Street and they were closed.

Grieving and alone, certain that her friend had died and knowing her companion was still searching for survivors, Carey began to look for a way to pitch in. Carey, a small, delicate woman with dark, shoulder-length hair, was rebuffed by the Uniformed Firefighters Association, reeling from the death of more than 320 of its fighters. The reason: She wasn't a union member.

Estimates on the number of dead and missing when two hijacked airlines rammed into the twin towers were running as high as 6,000, although there is reason now to believe the number is closer to 4,000. Hundreds of others were injured. Probably millions more suffer psychological trauma and anxiety.

'Don't Send Me Home--I Need to Be Here Right Now'

"I went into the armory at 14th Street, where the Red Cross was helping with trauma and missing persons," she recalls. "I saw this man working with the Red Cross and I went up to him.

"Look, I lost my friend, my boyfriend's a firefighter and he is down there constantly and he can't talk to me," she told the volunteer. "I know I'm spiraling, but don't send me home. I see that people are being sent home, but don't send me home because it's too much. I need to be here right now."

Carey was put to work for four straight weeks--with only three-and-a-half days off--one of the 20,000 Red Cross volunteers from all over the country who have provided unstinting assistance to New Yorkers after the attack. She was suddenly in charge of the victim's service unit at the 94th Street Pier and worked many 12- to 14-hour days, debriefing trauma victims and making referrals to the correct agencies. She worked with hundreds of police officers, firefighters, volunteers and the families of the victims.

"I had people coming in and telling me about the bodies exploding, body parts lying around," she says.

"I've spoken with families who just sobbed. They'd given so much factual information to the police, companies, et cetera, that when they finally got to us they were ready to spill their guts," Carey says.

Many Men Feared They'd Seem Crazy If They Saw a Therapist

For hundreds of hours, Carey listened to other people's stories. "I had a lot of men, and some women, ask me, 'If I see (a therapist) will people think I'm crazy?' and I said, this is not about strength, this is not about weakness, your gender or your age. We cannot work through this alone and we have to work together on this."

One woman stood out for her articulate rage and confusion.

"I'm pissed," the woman told Carey. "I want to know who was in charge of protecting my daughter. My daughter worked for Cantor Fitzgerald (a bond firm that lost 733 employees) and I want to know who was in charge of my daughter. She was 24 years old, and, without her, our family doesn't work. I want to know. Nobody's giving me answers. Nobody's helping me. It's not fair."

Carey replied, over and over again: "You're right. It's not fair."

She faxed the woman 27 pages of phone numbers, addresses, "anything I could find where she could call and make inquiries. I got a call the next day from the woman's husband who told me she was finally calm. And it was because of my work--she had hours and hours of phone numbers to call and try to find answers. That made me feel really good."